Day 318

Improbably, the woman conceived
after years of trying IVF, desperate 
to have a child.  Improbably, she
conceived:  quadruplets, all carried
to term, all healthy.  The reporter
does not tell us how old
they were, how many boy or girls.
All she says is that they were killed,
and their mother with them.  She is
speaking with the grandfather,
who can barely speak.  All those
years, he keeps saying, trying
to have a child.  And then four!
I am imagining her happiness, the happiness
of everyone who knew her.  I 
am imagining the four children
closer to each other than to anyone else.
I am hoping they died
at the same moment, in the same
bombing, the air utterly blackened, no one —
not the children, not their mother —
having to see the others dead.  I
am listening to the grandfather,
who has lost everything. The years
of hope and loss, the waiting,
the not knowing.  The improbable
joy.  To lose them
like this, the grandfather
is saying; and he cannot finish.
What words could there be? Everything
it took to bring them into this world…